January 2010

It took me a while to update my website. Today is the 6th of May 2010!

I say it again. This entry comes very late. Reason: ( You may guess it ) I was extremely busy. Work, work, work. I guess I have to find a way to break out more often. But no mather how busy I am there is a tradition I started when I became 30 - I do not work on my birthday! This year was the same. I took a day off and went to the Zoo. I wasn´t there for a long time but decided to use the opportunity to take some shots of animals in the new snow. It was biting cold but I really enjoyed it. The Zoo while very busy in spring or summer is a quiet place during those cold winter days. Going there in the middle of the week during the working hours also helps of course.

Because there are almost no visitors at all even shy animals are close to the fence. The lynx was lying there so close that I couldn´t get a nice picture because it was not possible to blur the fence. I took some images of one of the timberwolfes, some of the small pandas and of course a lot of images of the pelicans and herons but when I spotted the wild rabbits I knew that I had found the subjects that would give me the images of the day. Small white rabbits on snow - what a great opportunity. Of course you can forget the built in meter of the camera. I switched to full manual control and decided to shoot wide open ( well at a f4 zoom with an 1.4TC this still means just f5.6 ) to freeze their motion.

I was truly surprised how good it worked. In the past I went to the Zoo and shoot with my Nikon AF-S 2.8/300 ED mkI ( that´s a 3 kg lens on a 4kg Gitzo tripod ). Of course it gave me superiour image quality but the Canon 4/70-200IS with the Canon 1.4 teleconverter was not so bad at all. The biggest drawbacks were that the background is far more prominent when shooting with f5.6 instead of f2.8 and of course the loss of 2 stops. I could have done the same image at 100ASA instead of 400ASA with my old setup but there is also a big advantage. When you are used to lug around a very heavy lens and heavy camera on a very heavy tripod you really enjoy shooting with something almost as light as a bridge camera. It´s like a circle: I started with heavy photo gear. Than there was a time before my first D-SLR where I enjoyed to use an Olympus 100RS, a bridge camera with a 10x zoom with built in image stabilisator. Then D-SLR again first with a large telezoom and finally with a monster lens and large tripod. Now it seems I have come back to a more sensible equipment.

But thats life: You have to have it all before you can start to enjoy to have less, before you discover that less is more. Will I become an ascetic? Will I be able to live a live without all that stuff? I don´t think so. So my camera shop, my bike dealer or my hifi studio can relax because I don´t want to grow up!

settings main shots: M-Mode: 1/400@f5.6, 400ASA